Convert a JPG to SVG without tracing the compression noise
A JPG is never quite the picture that was drawn. JPEG earns its small file size by throwing detail away: it works in 8x8 pixel blocks, keeps each block's coarse brightness and discards the fine variation inside. Around a hard edge — the side of a letter, the rim of a badge — that shows up as ringing, a faint halo of in-between pixels nobody drew. Vectorising a JPG is less about drawing curves than about telling artwork from compression debris.
A tracer follows colour boundaries, and a halo looks exactly like a soft highlight to it. At a high colour count it outlines the halo too, and the SVG comes back with a wreath of thin slivers hugging every edge. The cure is arithmetic, not a filter: ask for 10–14 colours instead of the default 26 and those pixels are pulled into the nearest real colour before any curve is fitted.
The other JPEG fact worth knowing is what the format cannot hold: an alpha channel. A PNG can mark a pixel transparent, and the tracer leaves those pixels empty in the vector; a JPG carries no such mark. Whatever looked transparent was flattened onto a solid background, usually white, when the file was saved, so a JPG traces edge to edge and the background comes back as a real shape.
Drop an image here
or click to choose one
How it works
- Drop one JPG onto the converter (PNG and WEBP are read the same way, one image per conversion, up to 25 MB and 40 megapixels). The file's signature decides how it is read, so a mislabelled extension is not a problem.
- Set the colour count to about 12 rather than the default 26 — JPEG noise spends extra colours on artefacts, and a lower count folds those pixels back into the shapes they belong to.
- Leave shape stacking on Cut-outs so each colour region is cut out of the one beneath it and no two paths overlap.
- Zoom into the preview along a hard edge. If pale rings still trace as shapes of their own, lower the colour count again; if a real colour has vanished, raise it by two.
- Sign in with Google (free) to download the SVG; tick PDF, EPS, DXF or PNG as well and you also get a ZIP.
Who this is for
You rarely choose to start from a JPG — you inherit one. The client sends the logo as a .jpg from a phone gallery, the only surviving copy of a club crest is an email attachment, or someone photographed a printed sign. The vector you need — for a vinyl plotter, a laser, a poster or a vector editor — has to be rebuilt from those lossy pixels.
Being honest about the ceiling saves an hour of fiddling: tracing does not undo compression, it reads what survived. Flat artwork with a handful of colours rebuilds well: its shapes are large compared with the block artefacts sitting on them. A photograph becomes a poster-style illustration with banded tones — fine for a print, but not a photo-realistic vector. Every re-save compounds the damage, so hunt down the largest, least re-shared copy; enlarging a small JPG in an editor adds pixels, never detail.
Settings we suggest
Start at 12 colours. The colour slider runs from 2 to 64 and defaults to 26, which is generous for clean artwork and too generous for a JPG, where the spare clusters get spent describing block noise. For a two-tone logo or a stencil, ask for 2 colours: one flat silhouette, one clean contour, nothing left for artefacts to hide in. Raise it only if a colour you need disappears.
Leave shape stacking on Cut-outs. Each colour region is cut out of the one beneath it, so every pixel belongs to exactly one path: no overlapping fills, no double-cut lines on a plotter, and any surviving sliver can be clicked once and deleted. Stacked piles those fringes on top of each other instead.
Draw style stays on Fill shapes for logos and badges; Stroke edges suits a line drawing you want as open paths. Group by Colour writes one group element per colour, which turns deleting the white JPEG background into a single click. Outputs are SVG, PDF, EPS, DXF and PNG; picking more than one adds a ZIP. For a physical dimension, type a width and height in mm — that goes into the SVG and the DXF. Left blank, the artwork keeps the upload's pixel grid, where 96 pixels = 25.4 mm.
Questions
Why does my traced JPG have a thin outline around every shape?
That is JPEG ringing, traced faithfully. The pixels between ink and background are neither colour, so at a high colour count they get regions of their own. Drop to 10–14 colours — or to 2 for a single-colour mark — and they are absorbed into the nearest real colour.
Can I get a transparent background out of a JPG?
Not from the file itself: JPEG has no alpha channel, so the background is real opaque pixels, usually white. Trace with a low colour count and Group by Colour, then delete the background path in any SVG editor. If a PNG of the same artwork still has real transparency, start from that instead — transparent pixels stay empty in the vector. There is no background-removal step.
I have the logo as a JPG and a PNG. Which should I convert?
The PNG, every time. It is lossless, so its edges are the ones the designer drew, and it can carry transparency. JPEG's damage is permanent: once the blocks are quantised, nothing recovers the original edge. Use the JPG when it is the only copy left.
Will re-saving the JPG at maximum quality help?
No. A quality setting applies to the save you are doing now; it cannot restore detail an earlier save discarded, and it adds a fresh generation of loss. Upscaling is the same trap — find the largest original instead.
How long does a JPG take, and what are the limits?
Logos and stickers typically convert in 3–12 seconds in our local measurements; fine-line or noisy images take longer. If a conversion does not finish within 60 seconds it stops and suggests fewer colours or a smaller image. Uploads go up to 25 MB and 40 megapixels; images above 1.5 megapixels are downscaled before tracing.
Is it free, and do I have to sign in?
Free and watermark-free. Converting and previewing work before you sign in; downloading the SVG (or the PDF, EPS, DXF and PNG) needs a free Google sign-in. Before you sign in you can run 10 conversions per hour; signed-in users get 60 per hour and 300 per day. Download links expire after 1 hour, and files are removed by an automatic 1-day deletion rule.